Eyal Weizman is an architect who has worked and taught in Palestine, Tel Aviv and London, where his practice has to deal with both the practical and political meaning of pine trees and olive trees. And also, he has to deal with destruction, as do we all, as he describes in this interview: “There is a category in international humanitarian law called proportionality. It’s a calculation that assumes an economy of violence. Within that economy, the military and the NGOs tend to engage in bargaining. They say, no, that needs to be cheaper. And some people say, no, that needs to be more expensive, right? But they operate within the same market, so to speak. Too many civilians are being killed; too few civilians are being killed. To establish that, you need to undertake calculations. When you need to establish a threshold number of civilian casualties — Garlasco was asked to limit these to twenty-nine per bombing mission — this more or less abstract economy is transferred into an engineering problem: How much of the building should be destroyed? What is the minimum bomb to do that? If there was no threshold, he’d just choose a big-enough bomb to destroy the whole building. Instead, he needed to destroy two stories above, or part of a story — it is a craft, to design the destruction: the design of ruins.”

“At the moment, this study might need to be taken with a grain of salt.”
 — Dr. Peter Briss of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention criticizes a new study which claims that “low-salt diets increase the risk of death from heart attacks and strokes and do not prevent high blood pressure.” As an avowed sodium fan, I am going to ignore Dr. Briss’ cavil and keep pouring it on, because now I know it’s healthy! Also, who is writing the CDC’s material, Bruce Vilanch?

WWD surveyed six photo editors and designers about the soon-to-be iconic photo of the Obama team’s briefing during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. This is definitely one of the more interesting things you’ll read all day; each interviewee brings something different to the story.

“The male reluctance to shed tears is relatively new, says Tom Lutz, a University of California, Riverside professor. He traces this to the late 19th century, when factory workers — mostly men — were discouraged from indulging in emotion lest it interfere with their productivity.”
 — There’s a ton of interesting stuff about tears here.

“Despite fans reportedly chanting ‘Osama, woah-woah, Osama, woah-waoh, he’s hiding in Kabul, he loves the Arsenal’, Bin Laden was not a faithful of the north London club.”

Right now, they do a thing called the Local Government Investment Pool; there’s a ton of these, state to state, and they do cautious, over-night, low-return investing for counties and towns. But really these GIPs are actually kind of hectic sometimes! Florida’s GIP had a weird March: It opened the month with $7.3 billion, it had deposits of $690 million, withdrawals of $1.3 billion… and all of $1.8 million in earnings. Closing balance? $6.93 billion. (PDF.) Also they are wrangling with Lehman Brothers for selling them “certain unregistered secured notes” before going belly-up. So yes: is your money safe? Not at all!

So back in Camp Verde, our trusty town manager has an idea: let’s just go big or go home: “Martin suggested that the town consider working with financial services firm Stone and Youngberg to find more effective ways to increase returns on those millions in investments, possibly by as much as a factor of 10.” Wouldn’t it be awesome if all the counties put their savings in private hands? Or at least: wouldn’t it have been awesome if they’d done that in 2007?

Sure, there are funny gays in various entertainment fields, such as shoe design and Condé Nast magazines, but let us think of gays in actual comedy. Okay, so there’s Ellen. That guy ANT. Neil Patrick Harris. And… hmm.

Oh right. Scott Thompson. And Graham Chapman, of Monty Python. These two might prove a comedy “rule” that gays are often funny when in groups of straight people. Or when they are English: Stephen K. Amos, Simon Amstell, Matt Lucas, Julian Clary, Paul O’Grady. And Kenny Everett and Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams, RIP! Or when they are of an English province: Trey Anthony, say, from Canada. And Tommy Sexton. And I guess Trevor Boris counts! Then there’s… oh, Dave Rubin!

There’s a pretty equal number of ladies, of course. Don’t ever confuse Judy Gold and Julie Goldman. (Jews! I know!) Also don’t confuse Wanda Sykes, Elvira Kurt and René Hicks. That’s racist. (I’m kidding, it’s not. See what I did there?) Margaret Cho still counts. Also I will namedrop Alec Mapa in the interests of diversity!

Of the greats, you have Rip Taylor and Lily Tomlin. And more, hmm… I guess Eddie Murphy, if you count those who may prefer our sexual partners to be in that wonderful middle ground between gender norms. And Andy Dick counts. (There is such a thing as bisexuality!)

But now. Think of the least funny people you know: Susan Sontag, Bret Easton Ellis and Jeffrey Dahmer. All gay. All devoutly unhumorous. Why aren’t gay people funny?

Nature
They’re not funny from birth. Like, genetically. (I think that was the plot of Gattaca.)

Nurture
Their parents raised them to not be funny.

And that’s it.

Oh.

Well, there’s one possibility we can’t discount. Let’s call it the Tina Fey thesis.

The Tina Fey Thesis
So you know how ladies are treated kind of as a sidebar in comedy? Or as a flavor? (Like the way the blacks are treated in the visual arts world. Like, “Oh look, Mark Bradford can hold a paintbrush!” Not like, “Oh look at this awesome painting,” period, the end. Yeah, sorry, pet peeve.) Well, the ladies are taking up “all” the space. (By “all” I mean the 22% remaining space not taken by straight men.) They are the flavor. Who needs gay flavor when you have lady flavor?

Plus most of the straight men in comedy want to have sex with the ladies, though some of them aren’t so picky. As you know!

Meanwhile, straight guys think the lady-gay pact is out to get them. Why did Nick Di Paolo finally just get his first one-hour Showtime special? “Because the people in the industry are dumb fucks. They’re too busy looking for, you know, for the next funny chick or funny gay guy. I’m just another white guy in the mix.”

Oh, that’s why. (Wait, no it is not. It’s actually because Tim Allen was finally too busy and/or dead.) But I do believe that he believes this.

But the gays also did this to themselves.

So right: women in comedy were choosing between being in a boy’s club or doing comedy about being a lady, and sometimes doing both. The gays had less of an option of being in a boy’s club, so quite frequently they did comedy about being gay, so as to build an audience, but also, regarding which, zzz. Ellen’s sort of an exception, but not totally: it was all subtext. (The shoulder pads mostly.) Gay comics hit a ceiling because, um, even gay-topic comedy gets boring to (fickle) gays soon. And it certainly doesn’t interest straight people.

Mmm, message comedy. God bless! So with the gays in this box — which was a profitable box for some of them! — there was nowhere to integrate. They weren’t going to shame their way into writer’s rooms for sitcoms, weren’t going to do that well in TV in general. (They do so-so, to be fair. I mean, “Will and Grace” exec producer Max Mutchnick is back with “Shit My Dad Says”! That’s… grreaat. Enjoy.)

So now women are busily on a militant task force to take over comedy, while they are sucking all the gay air out of the room inadvertently. (We should all demand more pieces of a smaller pie, not a bigger pie!) It’s very, very violent, this struggle. They started with equal space on Chelsea Handler’s show (“lucky them”) and they will next launch an assault on, I dunno, Craig Ferguson or something.

But eventually the women will bring some gays with them. Because all women are equally nurturing and fair-minded. That will be in the year 2035. Then we will know the truth about whether gays can actually make with the funny.

The children to whom George W. Bush was reading The Pet Goat when he first got word of the 9/11 attacks: where are they now? They’re right here. Also, they’re 16, which… man.

Apparently, our “controversial” American President is to visit Ground Zero on 9/11. Wait, what? Correct: The Wall Street Journal now really owns the twisted “perception politics” beat.

What do you say about the first Israeli horror film… besides the fact that it’s the first Israeli horror film? And that, with that distinction comes a frenetic array of cultural, religious and political associations that may as well serve as a Rorschach test for anyone watching it? Israel as the setting for a horror film (Rabies, or Kalevet in Hebrew, which just debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival) is a manifesto in and of itself — particularly when the directors, Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, have been touting the movie as an allegory on the state of Israel (though honestly, they have plenty of incentive to spew jargon like this — it hands their film cultural significance on a platter).

Still, at the end of the day, no matter how much we may want to enmesh this film in political importance or elevate it to a cultural statement, it’s just a slasher flick. And a pretty good one! So let’s try to slog out of the political muck (as much as possible, anyway) and just talk about that.

The best part of being the “first slasher flick from a country” is the lack of canon dragging you down. There’s no precedent, no ankle-weights of Freddy or Jason or Michael or Carrie or Chuckie or Vigo the Destroyer, etc., etc. A clever filmmaker will take this freedom and use it to ferret out a new way of doing things, while remaining faithful to the genre at large.

All of which happens, for the most part, in Rabies. The premise sounds as unoriginal as they come (but then, that’s sort of the point). Good-looking (and I mean slap-somebody good-looking) 20-somethings heading for a day at the country club find themselves lost in the woods, hunted by a serial killer. Mayhem ensues, blood and madness spurt, and body counts rise.

The spark of originality comes from an early twist: taking the killer out of the equation. How many slasher films shoot the psychopath up with a tranquilizer and leave him unconscious ’til the third act? And then proceed to create shit so nuts you barely notice? It’s a neat trick that hasn’t been pulled off since… well, ever really. Of course, to get this trick to work, you’re required to believe that normal people could become murderous at the drop of a hat (or a gun) — a bit of a stretch, even for directors trying to make a statement about the savagery of their nation’s history (crap, there’s that political discussion again). The film plays with a few clever touches that are distinctly Israeli; one scene in an abandoned minefield is fantastically tense (you can’t exactly get away with that plotline in the woods outside Cleveland). But other imagery is unsubtle to the point of eye rolls — cue the close-ups of the young hottie wearing a Star of David around his neck, which eventually gets covered in blood.

Nonetheless, the mayhem manages to suck you in, particularly with the entrance of cops, who bring with them the “authority figures are worse than psychopaths” trope. Yes, it too has been done, but Danny Geva is just about the rapiest policeman ever depicted onscreen, and his scenes with the women are more viscerally uncomfortable than any murder in the film. His performance steals all attention away from the killer, and turns the film into a brutal gender battle. Let’s see that happen to Jason or Freddie.

Of course, in the third act, things fall apart. Massive plot points make no sense, huge details are never explained (is there incest going on here? Who is screwing whom? WTF??). Then things turn unapologetically sour and nasty when two sweet men are mistakenly murdered, leaving behind devastated women. Their grief transports you out of the adrenaline-cranked horror-movie fun into a world of loss — which again is fine for a political statement, but it won’t mean a good time at the scary movie. You can make your horror film, or you can make your fraught statement about Israel — but you’re not gonna bake both into the same cake.

As for future Israeli horror, Jerusalem’s walls have come down (sorry, I’ve been so good ’til now!). A zombie film is already in the works, promising Romero-levels of patent cultural critique. Though if there are any Palestinian zombie raids, I may have to maim somebody.

We are ranking movies now!! This one gets two drippy chainsaws (out of five).

Melissa Lafsky, The Awl’s Horror Chick, wants to be scared by your movie.